Teen Shakespeare films have largely been dismissed as films which “dumb down” Shakespeare’s original texts and which are marketed in a manipulative way in order to sell teens fantasies that appeal to them. Among the most popular and recognizable actresses of this genre is Julia Stiles, known for her leading roles in 10 Things I Hate About You, O, and Hamlet. Several scholars have critiqued Stiles’s films for the ways that they depict feminism and American teen girlhood. In this thesis, I argue that Stiles’s films present a spectrum of, an admittedly limited, feminism that becomes increasingly more progressive. By exploring Stiles’s portrayal of feminism in these films, the hope is to move away from the idea of teen Shakespeare films as merely dumbed down versions of the plays and to, instead, move towards an understanding of the political and social role of this generic category.

This dissertation offers fairly full readings of three early Shakespearean comedies. Because these works are still partly misunderstood, it has seemed reasonable to lay the critical emphasis on explication, though a certain amount of judging has been inevitable. The aim has been to induce recognition of aspects of these plays to which much modern criticism has seemed opaque.

There has been a tremendous growth in the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPU) for the acceleration of general purpose applications. The growth is primarily due to the huge computing power offered by the GPUs and the emergence of programming languages such as CUDA and OpenCL. A typical GPU consists of several 100s to a few 1000s of Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) cores, organized as 10s of Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), each having several SIMD cores which operate in a lock-step manner, o ering a few TeraFLOPS of performance in a single socket. SMs execute instructions from a group of consecutive threads, called warps. At each cycle, an SM schedules a warp from a group of active warps and can context switch among the active warps to hide various stalls. However, various factors, such as global memory latency, divergence among warps of a thread block (TB), branch divergence among threads of a warp (Control Divergence), number of active warps, etc., can significantly impact the ability of a warp scheduler to hide stalls. This reduces the speedup of applications running on the GPU. Further, applications containing loops with potential cross iteration dependences, do not utilize the available resources (SIMD cores) effectively and hence su er in terms of performance. In this thesis, we propose several mechanisms which address the above issues and enhance the performance of GPU applications through efficient warp scheduling, taming branch and warp divergence, and runtime parallelization. First, we propose RLWS, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Warp Scheduler which uses unsupervised learning to schedule warps based on the current state of the core and the long-term benefits of scheduling actions. As the design space involving the state variables used by the RL and the RL parameters (such as learning and exploration rates, reward and penalty values, etc.) is large, we use a Genetic Algorithm to identify the useful subset of state variables and RL parameter values. We evaluated the proposed RL based scheduler using the GPGPU-SIM simulator on a large number of applications from the Rodinia, Parboil, CUDA-SDK and GPGPU-SIM benchmark suites. Our RL based implementation achieved an average speedup of 1.06x over the Loose Round Robin (LRR) strategy and 1.07x over the Two-Level (TL) strategy. A salient feature of RLWS is that it is robust, i.e., performs nearly as well as the best performing warp scheduler, consistently across a wide range of applications. Using the insights obtained from RLWS, we designed PRO, a heuristic warp scheduler which in addition to hiding the long latencies of certain operations, reduces the waiting time of warps at synchronization points. Evaluation of the proposed algorithm using the GPGPU-SIM simulator on a diverse set of applications showed an average speedup of 1.07x over the LRR warp scheduler and 1.08x over the TL warp scheduler. In the second part of the thesis, we address problems due to warp and branch divergences. First, many GPU kernels exhibit warp divergence due to various reasons such as, different amounts of work, cache misses, and thread divergence. Also, we observed that some kernels contain code which is redundant across TBs, i.e., all TBs will execute the code identically and hence compute the same results. To improve performance of such kernels, we propose a solution based on the concept of virtual TBs and loop independent code motion. We propose necessary code transformations which enable one virtual TB to execute the kernel code for multiple real TBs. We evaluated this technique using the GPGPU-SIM simulator on a diverse set of applications and observed an average improvement of 1.08x over the LRR and 1.04x over the Greedy Then Old (GTO) warp scheduling algorithms. Second, branch divergence causes execution of diverging branches to be serialized to execute only one control ow path at a time. Existing stack based hardware mechanism to reconverge threads causes duplicate execution of code for unstructured control ow graphs (CFG). We propose a simple and elegant transformation to convert an unstructured CFG to a structured CFG. The transformation eliminates duplicate execution of user code while incurring only a linear increase in the number of basic blocks and also the number of instructions. We implemented the proposed transformation at the PTX level using the Ocelot compiler infrastructure and demonstrate that the pro-posed technique is effective in handling the performance problem due to divergence in unstructured CFGs. Our third proposal is to enable efficient execution of loops with indirect memory accesses that can potentially cause cross iteration dependences. Such dependences are hard to detect using existing compilation techniques. We present an algorithm to compute at run-time, the cross iteration dependences in such loops, using both the CPU and the GPU. It effectively uses the compute capabilities of the GPU to collect the memory accesses performed by the iterations. Using the dependence information, the loop iterations are levelized such that each level contains independent iterations which can be executed in parallel. Experimental evaluation on real hardware (NVIDIA GPUs) reveals that the proposed technique can achieve an average speedup of 6.4x on loops with a reasonable number of cross iteration dependences.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:06:47Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 ChristielenDS.pdf: 591277 bytes, checksum: c7d5644d2c09079d3ca05e8c502e6d39 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-11-25 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / Pygmalion (1913), by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), has many studies in literary criticism. However, this study brings a new interpretation to Shaw s play based on Harold Bloom s theory and methodology, that is, the anxiety of influence and the dialectic of revisionism. Through the analysis of poetic influence and the dialectic of love, we can see that Pygmalion represents an apophrades in relation to William Shakespeare s The Taming of the Shrew (1593) and Ovid s myth of Pygmalion and Galatea in Metamorphosis (c. 14), which creates a family romance between the three stories. Shaw s play surpasses The Taming of the Shrew when it shows the possibility of the relation between this parent poem and Ovid s myth, which it is also its parent poem, and because it represents a strong misreading of Shakespeare s play as well as of Ovid s myth. / Pigmale?o (Pygmalion, 1913), de George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), possui uma grande fortuna cr?tica. Entretanto, o presente estudo oferece uma nova interpreta??o para a pe?a de Shaw, com base na teoria e metodologia do cr?tico norte- mericano Harold Bloom (1930- ), a saber, a ang?stia da influ?ncia e o revisionismo dial?tico. Atrav?s da an?lise da influ?ncia po?tica e da dial?tica do amor ? que se pode perceber que Pigmale?o representa uma apophrades em rela??o ? pe?a A megera domada (The Taming of the Shrew, 1593) de William Shakespeare (1564-1616) e ao mito de Pigmale?o e Galat?ia encontrado em Metamorfoses (c. 14) de Ov?dio (43 a.C.-17), formando um romance familiar entre as tr?s. A pe?a de Shaw supera seu poema pai (A megera domada) ao mostrar a possibilidade de rela??o deste com a hist?ria de Ov?dio (sendo assim seu poema pai) e por fazer uma desleitura forte n?o s? da obra de Shakespeare, como tamb?m do mito de Ov?dio.

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This dissertation attempts to fill a void in early modern English drama studies by offering an in-depth, cross-gendered comparative study emphasizing representations of women’s discursive agency. Such an examination contributes to the continuing critical discussion regarding the nature and extent of women’s potential agency as speakers and writers in the period and also to recent attempts to integrate the few surviving dramas by women into the larger, male-dominated dramatic tradition. Because statements about the nature of women’s speech in the period were overwhelmingly male, I begin by establishing the richness and variety of women’s attitudes toward marriage and toward their speech relative to marriage through an examination of their first-person writings. A reassessment of the dominant paradigms of the shrew and the silent woman as presented in male-authored popular drama—including The Taming of the Shrew and Epicene—follows. Although these stereotypes are not without ambiguity, they nevertheless considerably flatten the contours of the historical patterns discernable in women’s lifewriting. As a result, female spectators may have experienced greater cognitive dissonance in reaction to the portrayals of women by boy actors. In spite of this, however, they may have borrowed freely from the occasional glimpses of newly emergent views of women readily available in the theater for their own everyday performances, as I argue in a discussion of The Shoemaker’s Holiday and The Roaring Girl. Close, cross-gendered comparison of two sets of similarly-themed plays follows: The Duchess of Malfi and The Tragedy of Mariam, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Victory. Here my examination reveals that the female writers’ critique of prevailing gender norms is more thorough than the male writers’ and that the emphasis on female characters’ material bodies, particularly their voices, registers the female dramatists’ dissatisfaction with the disfiguring representations of women on the maledominated professional stage. I end with a discussion of several plays by women—The Concealed Fancies, The Convent of Pleasure, and Bell in Campo—to illustrate the various revisions of marriage offered by each through their emphasis on gendered performance and, further, to suggest the importance of the woman writer’s contribution to the continuing dialectic about the nature of women and their speech.

This project aims to take the investigation of food in early modern drama, in itself a relatively new field, in a new direction. It does this by shifting the critical focus from food-based metaphors to food-based properties and food-producing cook characters. This shift reveals exciting, unexpected, and hitherto unnoticed contexts. In The Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus, which were written during William Shakespeare’s inn-yard playhouse period, the playwright exploits these exceptionally aromatic venues in order to trigger site-specific responses to food-based scenes in these plays. Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair brings fair-appropriate gingerbread properties onstage. When we look beneath the surface of this food effect to its bread and wine ingredients, however, it reveals a subtext that satirizes the theory of transubstantiation. Jonson expands on this theme by using Ursula’s cooking fire (a property staged in Jonson’s representation of Smithfield’s Bartholomew Fair) to engage with the prison narrative of Anne Askew, who was burned to death in front of Bartholomew Priory on the historic Smithfield for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. This thesis also investigates water, which, for early moderns, was a complex and quasi-mystical liquid: it was a primary element, it washed sin from the world during the Great Flood, it was a marker of status, it was a medicine, and it was a cookery ingredient. Christopher Marlowe not only uses dirty water to humiliate his doomed monarch in Edward II, but he also uses it to apportion blame to the king for his own downfall. In Timon of Athens, Shakespeare draws on the theory of the elements to cast Timon as a man of water, who, Jesus-like, breaks up and divides (or splashes around) his body at his “last” supper. Fully-fledged cook characters were a relative rarity on the early modern stage. This project looks at two exceptions: Furnace in Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts and the unnamed master cook in John Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Rollo, Duke of Normandy. Both playwrights use their respective gastronomic geniuses to demonstrate the danger that lower-order expertise poses to the upper classes when society is in flux. Finally, this project demonstrates that a link existed between ornate domestic food effects and alchemy. It shows how Philip Massinger’s The Great Duke of Florence and Thomas Middleton’s Women, Beware Women use food properties associated with alchemy to satirize notions of perfection in their play-worlds.